Category: GNOME

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July, July

veronica mars: I’ve watched the season finale last week and it was awesome; the entire second season was awesome, but last episode was a blast. I’ll avoid any spoiler here, but really you should watch the show if you aren’t – with its gritty and cynical view of the world, with good acting and great storylines; I’m really happy CW confirmed it for another season.

foundation: my application for the GNOME foundation membership has been finally approved; I’ve asked for the ‘cool @gnome.org email alias’ and behdad was really kind enough to set it up, so kudos goes to him as well as the Foundation membership committee.

gnome-utils: work and real life took precedence in the last weeks; so I didn’t release gnome-utils in time for GNOME 2.15.2. Development didn’t stop, though, and you can count on a release in time for 2.15.3. Especially the Dictionary users should track the next unstable release, as it will feature the Infamous Missing Speller Widget, plus a bunch of fixes and other features. I’ll make a blog with screenshots about it soon. By the way, check out gnome-utils roadmap on the wiki and see if there are tasks you’d like to mention, or take up.

GUADEC: My proposal for a tutorial about the recent files and bookmarks architecture has been left out of the core days, and moved to the warm up weekend like the other tutorials; so, if the provisional schedule holds, I’ll give my tutorial at 18:00 on Sunday, right before the GNU/FIFA soccer game – I’ll try to keep the tutorial short. :-)

Now listening: The Decemberists, Castaways and cutouts

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The Mariner’s Revenge Song

From the libegg’s ChangeLog:

2006-05-07  Emmanuele Bassi  

	Finally deprecate EggRecent.  So long, and thanks for all the bugs.

	* libegg/recent-files/THIS_IS_DEPRECATED_USE_GTK_RECENT_CHOOSER:
	* libegg/recent-files/egg-recent-model.h: Deprecate the EggRecent code,
	now that GTK 2.9.0 is out; if you want to compile it, you
	must define EGG_ENABLE_RECENT_FILES before including
	egg-recent-model.h.

This is the first version of the so-called “Ramone Deprecation System”: it means that if you blindly re-sync with libegg HEAD, or if you decide to use the EggRecent code now, a guy called Ramone will be sent directly to your home by the Gtk+ Cabal; he will politely knock at your door and once you’ve opened, he will beat the crap out of you.

Next, the Gtk+ Cabal will implement the “Puppies Deprecation System”. And believe me: you don’t want to know how that works.

Now listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

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Gtk+ 2.9.0 released

Finally, the first development release of GTK+ (codenamed The Magic Project Ridley aka libgnome sucks release by a developer whose name won’t be disclosed in this blog) has been finally sealed by Matthias Clasen yesterday, after battling with make distcheck.

There is so much goodness in this release that I’ll just wait for Kris to make a blog about it, and link the NEWS file and let you see the enormous work that has been done in the past nine months. So, find the contributor nearest to you and hug him (or buy him a beer); to help this hugging (and beer buying) procedure, here’s a list:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Akkana Peck, Alexander Larsson, Alexander Nedotuskov, Alex Graveley, Anders Carlsson, Andrei Yurkevich, Andrew Conkling, Andrew S. Dixon, Arjan van de Ven, Arnaud Charlet, Bastien Nocera, Behdad Esfahbod, Benedikt Meurer, Benjamin Berg, Benjamin Otte, Benoît Carpentier, Bodo-Merle Sandor, Bogdan Nicula, Brad Taylor, Calum Benson, Carlos Garnacho Parro, Carl Worth, Chris Lahey, Chris Lord, Christian Kirbach, Christian Lohmaier, Christian Neumair, Christian Persch, Christian Stimming, Christophe Belle, Claudio Saavedra, Clytie Siddall, Colin Walters, Cory Dodt, Coverity, Crispin Flowerday, Damien Carbery, Damon Chaplin, Daniel Drake, Daniel Kasak, Dan Winship, Dave Andreoli, David Baron, David Trowbridge, Davyd Madeley, Denis Auroux, Dennis Cranston, Diego González, Dom Lachowicz, Donald Straney, Duncan Coutts, Ed Catmur, Elie De Brauwer, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Eric Cazeaux, Evert Verhellen, Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Frederic Croszat, Guilherme de S. Pastore, Guillaume Cottenceau, Gustavo Carneiro, Hamed Malek, Hans Breuer, Havoc Pennington, Hylke van der Schaaf, Ian McDonald, Itai Bar-Haim, Jaap A. Haitsma, James Su, Jean-Yves Lefort, Jens Granseuer, Jeremy Cook, Jody Goldberg, Joe Marcus Clarke, Joe Wreschnig, Johan Dahlin, John Cupitt, John Ehresman, John Finlay, John Palmieri, John Spray, Jonathan Blandford, Jorn Baayen, JP Rosevaar, Jürg Billeter, Kalle Vahlmann, Kathy Fernandez, Kazuki Iwamoto, Kean Johnston, Kjartan Maraas, Kristian Rietveld, Larry Ewing, Leena Gunda, Lillian Angel, Li Yuan, Lorenzo Gil Sanchez, Maciej Katafiasz, Magnus Bergmann, Markku Vire, Mark McLoughlin, Marko Anastasov, Mark Wielaard, Mart Raudsepp, Martyn Russell, Mathias Hasselmann, Matthijs Douze, Maxim Udushlivy, Michael Emmel, Michael Natterer, Milosz Derezynski, Morten Welinder, Murray Cumming, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, Nicolas Setton, Niklas Knutsson, Olexiy Avramchenko, Owen Taylor, Paolo Borelli, Paolo Maggi, Peter Breitenlohner, Peter Harvey, Peter Lund, Peter Zelezny, Philip Langdale, Raphael Slinckx, Ray Strode, Richard Hult, Robert Ögren, Rodney Dawes, Ross Burton, Ryan Lovett, Sadrul Habib Chowdhury, Sebastien Bacher, Søren Sandmann, Stanislav Brabec, Stefan Kost, Stephane Chauveau, Steve Chaplin, Steve Frécinaux, Sven Herzberg, Sven Neumann, Thomas Broyer, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Thomas Klausner, Thomas Leonard, Tim Evans, Tim Janik, Todd Berman, Tommi Komulainen, Torbjörn Andersson, Tor Lillqvist (and his Evil Twin), Torsten Schoenfeld, Tze’ela Hebron, Vincent Untz, Wolfgang Thaller, Wouter Bolsterlee, Yang Hong, Yevgen Muntyan, Yong Wang. And, obviously, our fearless maintainer Matthias Clasen.

Kudos to all of them.

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Growing Family

I’ve just finished including baobab, the disk usage analysis tool written by Fabio Marzocca (and others), into gnome-utils HEAD. Everything seems to build fine, and make distcheck has just confirmed that gnome-utils-2.15.0 is ready to be released. I plan to give the final touches before the deadline of tomorrow, so that the first unstable release of Gnome will ship the growing family of gnome-utils.

Now Listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

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For the price of a cup of tea

Here’s a screenshot of testaction test showing the GtkRecentAction action for use with the GtkUIManager. The action is bound to a menuitem tag inside the UI definition markup.

GtkRecentAction test

The code needs cleaning up and the hooking up of the GtkRecentChooser interface virtual methods, but it’s not a big issue; setting all the recent chooser knobs using the recent chooser API is not the most beautiful approach I could come up with, though. But so is setting all the properties using specially crafted functions.

The next issue is inlining the list inside a menu (to make the Gedit maintainers happy ;-)). The current (and soon to be deprecated) EggRecent code used the awful EggRecentViewGtk object and its evil spawn (EggRecentViewUIManager and the most devilish EggRecentViewBonobo). The GtkRecent approach “get the list from the recent manager and build the menu items” works for hand-built menus, but for menus created using the UI manager there’s no real option, as there’s no way to create a list of items from a GtkAction. One way to implement it might be adding a GList * (*create_menu_items) (GtkAction *action); virtual method inside GtkActionClass.

Update 2006-04-18@03:51: the tracking bug with my initial draft for the GtkRecentAction is #338843

Now listening: Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

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ChangeLog

moving out: Marta has been in London a couple of times, in these two weeks; she has found a nice house in Crystal Palace, and began to buy furniture and stuff, and preparing it for us to move in. Next week, we’re both going to London and buy the remaining stuff (a sofa-bed, a table for the living room and some chairs to begin with). We should return in Milan for a couple of days on the 4th of May, as we must sign documents and papers for the marriage, and actually choose its date (it’ll be in July, probably).

gtk+ recent: the merge went well; on the gtk-devel list, Murray Cumming pointed out a couple of issues; most notably, the lack of integration with the GtkUIManager. The plan was to add a placeholder tag to the markup used to build the UI, but I really don’t like this approach anymore: it’s inherently messy. As a replacement, I coded up in a couple of hours a new GtkAction subclass: GtkRecentAction; when bound to a menu item tag, it creates a new submenu hooked to a GtkRecentChooserMenu; when bound to a toolbar item tag, it creates a GtkMenuToolButton like the one Gedit uses for the Open toolbar button. Unfortunately, I still can’t see a way to hook up an inlined list of menu items. Well, I suppose I’ll have to file a bug to the HIG and have it changed to use submenus for the list of recently used files. ;-)

gnome-utils: good news everyone: I’ve asked Fabio Marzocca for his permission to include into the gnome-utils package the fine disk usage tool called Baobab that he wrote; he agreed, and work is underway to clean up the code and hook it up to the gnome-utils build, in order to have it ready for the 2.15.1 release. Also, work is underway to add Solaris support to the system log viewer, and I’m fixing up a bunch of open bugs for the dictionary, including the re-addition of the “speller tool” (the list of matching words showed if no definitions were to be found).

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Lazy loading

Little post about a useful design pattern in GLib and GTK, written down after a question on the + channel

While I’m not Philip and I won’t go as far as talking about this in public, I wrote down a simple design pattern for lazy loading stuff from a list into a GtkTreeView without blocking your interface or using threads.

Lazy loading using the main loop.

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The API has landed

The GtkRecent code is finally in gtk+ HEAD branch.

A couple of things are still missing, mostly documentation and examples (the exact list is here, if you want to check).

The code needed a year to take shape (I was beginning to mull over it a bit too much), but it is cleaner, more efficient and works better than the EggRecent code, that has been copied and pasted all around the world.

The heroes of this tale are undoubtedly: James Willcox, for writing the original code (even if he didn’t reply to my email about its state bad boy, bad boy); Federico Mena-Quintero, for listening to me while we were waiting at a terrible restourant in Stuttgart, and for saying: Go ahead, implement it, and everyone will love you!; Matthias Clasen (still no blog, Matthias?), for helping and suggesting and asking and for maintaining the Best. Toolkit. Ever.

This work is dedicated to my soon-to-be wife, Marta, and for the patience she had while I hacked till the wee hours of the morning. I love you.

And this is just the beginning… I sense bug reports coming…

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Merger

Seems that I’m being syndacated… aggregated… whatever… on a Planet, so hi!

I’m starting merging the GBookmarkFile parser into my local copy of GLib’s HEAD branch (the tracker bug is #327662). I’ve created a testb suite and a bunch of invalid and valid bookmark files, in order to test it – and they actually helped me find a couple of stupid regressions that I had introduced.

Pending review of the patch by Matthias, the code should go in GLib first thing next week; once GBookmarkFile is in, the recent manager and the related widgets are due to go in the following days. Right now, I’m writing a patch for GTK’s HEAD branch – stay tuned for a tracker bug about it. Update 2006-03-27@00:31: bug #336121.

Whoa, just a couple weeks shy on a year since I began writing the Perl bindings for the egg-recent code – which is the reason that forced me to open that can of worms and where all the recent files rewrite really began. Never thought that it would take this long, or that it would take me this far. Well, actually I never really thought I had some chances of actually contributing something to the platform libraries at all.

Now listening: Burning down the house, Talking Heads

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ChangeLog

Long time, no blog.

Here’s a brief recap of what happened in the last three weeks:

  • Matthias Clasen has began reviewing the Recent Documents code, and we are planning to get it merged beginning next week; I sent a recap to the gtk-devel mailing list, and I’ll send the draft for the Desktop Bookmark specification on the xdg mailing list at fd.o (like I did a year ago, but now I have a working implementation);
  • GNOME 2.14 is out!
  • gnome-utils 2.14.0 is out too!
  • Me and Marta went to London, last week: she went to look the premises of the London School of Economics, as she’ll be taking a MSc there starting from September; me, I met with Matthew Allum, and following the arrengements we made at FOSDEM last Februrary, I signed a contract for working with the great guys at OpenedHand.
  • And last, but not least (or I would be in trouble), I’m getting married!